some people on this platform

Words mean what they're used to mean. Even the word "government" is wildly different between Europe and the US. We flip out over headlines like the government of Belgium has collapsed! and it's only as much of a kerfuffle as the House trying to elect a Speaker.

The only source that life there is terrible are defector's testimonies, which contradict each other on a daily basis and where the worst, most emotional stories are rewarded with fame and money.

There are other sources.

For example:

Their average height is much lower than people from South Korea. The most likely cause is malnutrition. When malnutrition affects even the military, your civilians aren't doing well.

If you're looking for sources, there are plenty of links should you search for "north korean vs south korean height". The difference is pretty dramatic for 75 years of isolation.

thank you, comrade!

one thing i might add is the fact that most if not all of the propagated lies about the dprk are projection. sexual slavery was a thing the american occupation forces engaged in massively and south korean dictator pak chong-hui was killed during a dinner party with a underage concubine present. later, haircut policing was a thing in the south during the 1980s under chon tu-hwan. the most prominent korean defector, pak yon-mi is a white supremacist btw.

i believe that the whole hacking thing is massively exaggerated by western media as part of their whole "the enemy is both weak and strong"-strategy. it is both a way to engineer further fear mongering against korea, as well as to mask their own incompetence. but even if im wrong and they are indeed from the dprk, i still find them quite based and funny tbh.

do you happen to have any resources on the lgbt situation within the county? i would love to educate myself on the topic.

i also slightly disagree with you on china. they never seized being a socialist state, but have sadly become revisionist since deng. that doesnt make them any less worthy of critical support though.

See also:

A new book by Kristen Ghodsee, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that women have better sex under socialism.

If that sounds strange to you, consider this: A survey of East and West Germans after reunification in 1990 found that Eastern women (the socialist side of Germany during the Cold War) had twice as many orgasms as Western women.

What in the world accounts for such a wide gap?

According to Ghodsee, it’s about social safety nets. If, she argues, you build a society that supports women and doesn’t punish them for having children or devalue their labor, it turns out they’ll be happier and have better sex.

But it doesn't matter how many studies or surveys or policy differences you point to -- some guy always has an old relative whose story outweighs everything.

What exactly are these quotes supposed to prove? This was what, a few months or a few years after reunification? Any social change that large is going to cause some turbulence. And of course Parenti has an agenda, so he wouldn't include someone lauding their new experience.

Ah yes the oh so good DDR with exciting features such as

• no freedom of movement

• constant shortage of any goods

• being a dictatorship

• (contrary to your first point) a housing shortage

• a culture so dictated by work that people had little to no free time

• political pressure

• control over the media

• the fucking stasi

And what i mean by pretty socialist is: everyone gets equal opportunities no matter what race, religion, gender, political views, etc. I want that chad - who just lost all his belongings - has the same chance to live a fulfilled live as elon musk has. I abhorr the fact that there are billionaire's or even just millionaire's while other people have to choose between paying rent or eating, and those people not even being in the worst situation compared to others.

I want almost, but not completely, communism

This is bullshit. I will refute most of your points as someone who has lived in Socialist Hungary before the iron curtain.

1. Housing was not guaranteed. You were assigned lodging based on need. If you had no children, you were staying with your parents and two siblings in the 1BR apartment. Once you got a kid, if you were a young couple, you got an apartment with an elderly in it, that you had to take care of along with your new born, until their death. After that the apartment would be yours. To overcome the shortages of housing, the government invested into building temporary housing called panel buildings. They were not meant to last for more than twenty years.
2. Education was discriminatory in the sense that those favoured by the party got a pass. You have long hair? Your dad had long hair? You are a Gypsy? Yeah sure, you can pass elementary grade 8, but you sure as hell won't be allowed to go into a four-year highschool for your profession and graduation . Best you could hope for is a 2 year middle school for a manual labour job (szakmunkásképző). If at all. Often it's off to the fields for you to work at the communal fields.
3. 0% unemployment because if you are unemployed you go to prison. Off to the fields or else!
4. Sales tax (VAT) has been 25% even before 1988
5. The railway system the country has was all built before the second world war. It got maintained during socialism, but the best they could do was put train drivers on concession show trials and execute them when accidents happened instead of actually improving the system. To this day the max speed on these rail lines is 120kmph and many of the smaller lines are falling into disrepair and unelectrified.
6. Healthcare was universal, however it was not highly developed nor without discrimination. What was true for education was also true here. You better be a good party member or else. If you were lucky, you had a relative working in healthcare to skip waiting lines (I've benefited of this a lot)
7. This one was a given. Although you still had to pay for meals for your kid at the daycare. But the times were also different back then. Those responsible for child care were not necessarily professionals and hitting children if they had misbehaved was still a thing.
8. I don't think this had a measurable comparison in any way. How do you draw comparisons?
9. Ahh yes, how nice. Went from nazi dictatorship to literal Russia planted dictatorships in both East Germany and Hungary ('56).

Standard tankie tactic of telling people that literally lived under Soviet regime that they're wrong about their own experience. Stfu man

A prison the size of a country is still a prison.

( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoJ0Pih0Ssc )( How the Berlin Wall Worked )

My family escaped to West Germany shortly after the war. They escaped starvation and joblessness. You are wrong.

Good luck getting any of that like healthcare or housing without bribing. Or buying tampons in a shop lol.

Are you 13 years old or just trolling? No one can be that brain washed.

... would you be happy in prison, on the basis that there's food and housing and you can take correspondence courses?

• and most importantly no fascists in government

Like it matters what color the Secret Police's armbands are. But hey, your kids will be taken care of! Even if... something happens to you.

There’s a spectre haunting Sailing7

Same

You are the meme here. That's the point.

The only replicatable piece of culture in this thread is the edgelord leammy.ml user who thinks anyone values their take on socioeconomics.

Его поинт в том что социализм это не только исковерканный марксистско-ленинистский брэйн рот жёстко социально репрессивных стран как бест корея, полно и анархистов и соц демократов которые так же зовут себя социалистами но они не будут симпить за Ким Чин Ина, лол

You're conflating the terms "socialism" and "democratic socialism".

The US is included in my list too with the Native American genocide for what its worth lol. But people tend to forget that Soviet Russia and Communist China killed millions of their own people. They should not be praised or imitated. We should learn from the horrible mistakes of the past.

It's not very enlightened to call entire movements like libertarian socialism (AKA anarchism) just idealist, ineffectual, and to imply they're essentially brainwashed by the US government.

Anti-state movements have a history as long and storied as socialism, and theoretical frameworks for their beliefs far more complex than you give them credit for.

Anarchist Spain and the Makhnovhscina as short lived as they were were closer to even Marxist communism than any of those authoritarian shitholes

I said nothing about socialism

I said "political propaganda messaging", of which i find annoying even if they support my political views

Yeah, go inspect drone ordinance.